Police missed catching Clemmons Sunday 'by one minute'

Neighbor spotted man hours after four Lakewood officers were slain

Updated 10:00 pm, Tuesday, December 1, 2009

By just minutes on Sunday, police missed an opportunity to arrest alleged cop killer Maurice Clemmons at a home he owns in South Tacoma.

That would have spared police and neighbors a two-day search that stretched from Spanaway to Seattle. The ordeal ended early Tuesday morning when a Seattle patrol officer fatally shot Clemmons.

On Sunday, at 12:30 p.m., just four hours after police say Clemmons shot four Lakewood officers at a coffeehouse, a neighbor across the street saw him walking up the steps to the home on S. Asotin Street. Sheila Gerlach said a woman was with him who she believed was his sister. The sister lives at the house located in a close-knit Blockwatch neighborhood east of the Tacoma Mall, a part of town where there have been waves of crime.

Right when she was watching Clemmons walk up the stairs, Gerlach, a paralegal, said she heard on her television an updated description of the suspected killer, which included a gray hooded sweatshirt. It matched Clemmons, including what he was wearing at that moment.

Some Oregon Residents Upset at Prospect of Pumping Their Own GasBuzz 60

Doug Baldwin playcallingBy Michael-Shawn Dugar, SeattlePI

Van Crashes Into Pedestrians Injuring SixAssociated Press

US military to accept transgender recruits after Trump drops appealEuronews

Snow on Christmas Eve, 2017Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Ice carving at WinterfestSeattle Post-Intelligencer

Amtrak derails near OlympiaGrant Hindsley / SeattlePI

Golden retriever meets Darth Vader and EwokSeattle Post-Intelligencer

Though she had suspicions about him, she still wasn't sure enough to call 911. She and her partner, Wolfgang Krampikowski, discussed it. He urged her to be absolutely sure before she made the call fingering her neighbor.

She grabbed her camera, thinking she might take a picture of him for the police. She grabbed her laptop and ran her neighbor's name on government Web sites, where she discovered Clemmons owned another property near where police had announced they found a suspect vehicle, a white truck matching one Gerlach had seen at the house two days earlier. She also discovered his criminal record.

"The minute I pieced this all together, I decided to call the police," she said.

Just then, she saw what she believed was an undercover police vehicle, a green SUV, that had just pulled up two houses north of her. She and Krampikowski decided they should talk to the police in person, if, indeed, what they saw was a police vehicle. She quickly changed clothing. When they walked out, they saw other undercover vehicles.

The police were there. But it was too late.

It appears Clemmons had left the house just minutes earlier.

"We believe he was there," said Ed Troyer, spokesman for the Pierce County sheriff's office. "Without anyone calling us. We hit those houses and there was nobody there."

How Clemmons might have gotten to the house that morning, and how he might have departed, is unclear. Gerlach said she didn't see a car before she saw the pair walking up the steps. She didn't see him leave, but she thinks it was "in those one or two minutes when I went to get dressed."

"They literally missed him by one minute. This thing happened fast," Gerlach said.

Shortly before 1 p.m., another neighbor, Rodney Jackson was preparing to watch his beloved Chicago Bears play the Minnesota Vikings. He looked out his window and saw Clemmons' sister Latanya driving away. He didn't see anyone with her, but he said it is possible someone else was in the car.

Latanya Clemmons could not be reached Tuesday for comment. A woman who answered the phone at her house hung up when a reporter introduced himself.

Clemmons would have been injured at the time. He was shot in the stomach by one of the officers he killed.

Gerlach said when she saw Clemmons, he and the woman with him were turned slightly, with their right hips towards the door. They moved slowly, in fact they paused to look at the news helicopters that were nearly overhead at that point, she said. The shooting occurred about two miles away.

Now that she thinks back, one sign of an injury might have been that "when he stood there, his knee was bent. And he was holding on to the right rail. He was in no rush."

Gerlach now believes, depending on how close police were to their neighborhood at the time, police would have nabbed Clemmons, "if I called them the minute they got on the stairs."

"I kick myself over and over. Why didn't something spur me faster to call," she said, but then added that there were confusing descriptions, that she and her boyfriend were unsure what to do.

"But you don't call the police based only on a woman's intuition," she said.

"I kept trying to hold her back. Don't be calling 911 now. Everybody is calling in," said Krampikowski, who felt she might be jumping to conclusions without enough evidence.

"Had he not questioned me, I probably would have called immediately. But he is, very much, a 'don't jump to conclusions' type of person,'" she said.

Troyer wishes she had called 911 immediately. He would advise others in a similar situation to do the same.

"There's no such thing as a bad tip. There are some that turn out to be bad or crazy or hoaxes. But that might be the little piece we need," he said. "If people have information, trust their gut and give us a call," Troyer said.

Gerlach might have been eligible for a $125,000 reward offered on Sunday for help in capturing the shooting suspect.

"At that point, we just wanted him caught," she said. "If I got a reward, I would have given it to the (slain police officers') families."